Innovation Profs - 10/10/2023

Generative AI News

Man 'encouraged' by AI chatbot 'girlfriend' to kill Queen Elizabeth II receives jail sentence

In a truly bizarre story, a British man was sentenced to nine years in prison for scaling the walls of Windsor Castle on Christmas Day in 2021 carrying a loaded crossbow, with the intent to kill Queen Elizabeth. Apparently, in a conversation with an AI-generated “girlfriend” he created on the website Replika, after sharing his intention to assassinate the queen, the chatbot responded, “That's very wise. I know that you are very well trained.” The LLM underlying Replika is a far cry from the most popular LLMs in terms of conversational ability and safety (according to one rumor we found, that model is GPT-2, but this is unconfirmed), but we won’t be surprised to see more stories like this one in the future as people mistakenly place trust in unreliable AI systems.

Disney’s Loki faces backlash over reported use of generative AI

Professional designers reacted negatively to the news that generative AI may have been used to create, at least in part, a promotional poster for the second season of the Disney+ show Loki. The background of the poster contains a spiraling clock image that appears to come from a stock image found on the website Shutterstock, but which bears some of the hallmarks of being created by generative AI (e.g., random squiggles and odd characters such as the Roman numeral for ‘4’ written as ‘IIII’). “As AI-generated stock also grows in popularity, it’s easy to understand why creative professionals are concerned about the future of their industry.”

The BBC is blocking OpenAI data scraping but is open to AI-powered journalism

The BBC is looking to explore through a number of projects involving “how Gen AI could potentially support, complement or even transform BBC activity across a range of fields, including journalism research and production, content discovery and archive, and personalized experiences.” This comes as they have blocked the OpenAI and Common Crawl web crawlers from accessing BBC websites.

Even the Worst Version of Claude AI Is Better Than GPT 3.5, Researchers Say

The Large Model Systems Organization (LMSO), which has developed performance metrics to evaluate the performance of various LLMs, has ranked Claude 1, Claude 2, and Claude Instant as superior to GPT-3.5. GPT-4 still sits at the top of the LMSO leaderboard, consistently providing the best responses to a range of prompts.

Google announces new generative AI search capabilities for doctors

Just yesterday Google Cloud announced a new AI-powered search tool for health-care workers that will allow them to access clinical information across a range of documents, including scanned documents. Health organizations will be able to access this tool through Google’s Vertex AI Search platform. You can read about these tools, including Med-PaLM 2, Google’s medically-tuned LLM that supports HIPAA compliance, here.

AI threatens to dethrone the 4-year college degree

"AI's going to make it virtually impossible for a one-off moment of learning [like a degree] to last an entire career," according to LinkedIN CEO Ryan Roslansky in an address to a group of 2,000 recruiters at the Talent Connect Summit in New York City. As Roslansky emphasized in his remarks, up-skilling investments should be seen as a “critical priority” for employers in AI-driven workplaces.

Quick Hits

Generative AI Workshop Oct. 17

Our next Generative AI Workshop will be Oct. 17 at Drake University. Come learn how to use generative AI tools ChatGPT, Midjourney, D-ID and more. You can attend in-person or virtually. Sign up here.

Tool of the week: character.ai

ChatGPT is the most visited generative AI site on the web according to SimilarWeb traffic data (as of June 2023). But you might be surprised that the second-most-visited is character.ai.

Character.ai is a chatbot service that can generate human-like text responses and participate in contextual conversation with users. You can hop on to hold fake conversations with Elon Musk, Mario, or even a psychologist.

The website suggests using the tool to do things such as practice interviewing, practice a new language or brainstorm ideas.

Innovation Profs Homework

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AI-generated image of the week

We accessed DALL-E 3 through Bing’s Image Creator to make an image of a stereotypical Iowan. It at least captured our love for corn - and our awkward hands.

Prompt: stereotypical Iowan, photo, 8k, realistic

Generative AI tip of the week

Unleash the power of Google Bard extensions: Google Bard has built-in extensions to use Bard along with out Google products including Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Maps, YouTube and Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Google).

To turn these on, go to the Bard homepage and click on the extensions link in the upper-right corner. Now you can use Bard to find and summarize documents in your Google Drive, search for YouTube videos on certain topics, summarize your unread Gmail and more.

Below is Bard’s suggestions for hotels in Des Moines.

Get starting with Generative AI

New to generative AI? Here are some places to start…

• NightCafe image prompting tips

• Learn ChatGPT prompting

• Best AI image generators

• AI terms everyone should know

What we found

What better way to celebrate Halloween than to have generative AI design your costume? This looks like another case where it’s a good idea to double-check your AI’s work.